


Reflection

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Apostate Inquisitor, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Romance, Trespasser DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 12:35:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13547439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: The Dread Wolf can't let the past die, least of all where Trevelyan is concerned.





	Reflection

Solas watched the Inquisitor chase after the Viddasala in the eluvian of his grotto. It would not be long now. He had activated the mirrors in such a way that the Inquisitor would end up here alone, in time to see Solas dispatch the remainder of the Qunari. If all went according to plan, Trevelyan would arrive exhausted, in pain, and suggestable to the might of Solas’s power.

As he watched, Trevelyan stumbled and grasped his glowing hand. The Anchor surged and flattened the grass around him, lifting Dorian and Varric off the ground and hurtling them through the air.

Solas could not hear the Inquisitor’s scream, but he felt it nonetheless.

“It was never my intention….” Solas stopped himself. He was alone, and such rehearsals were pointless. Over the past few days, he found himself more and more practicing what he would say to Trevelyan when they finally met face to face.

What could he offer, save apologies?

No, no matter what remorse he felt, this meeting was a show of force. A last courtesy to a dear friend, an outreach of sympathy, but a line in the sand nevertheless. He would save Trevelyan’s life, and then they would part ways as enemies. That was how it must be.

It was times like these that he wished he had an actual mirror instead of an eluvian.

Making due with a puddle of water, he folded his arms behind his back and examined his pose. Wolf pelt brushed, boots tightly laced, every link in his mail polished to a burning shimmer. Imposing. Striking. Intimidating—

Solas tugged off his gauntlet and scrubbed a finger across his teeth. Did his breath stink? He had eaten a garlic pastry that morning for breakfast—in retrospect a poor idea. He coughed into his palm and sniffed it.

That would be his luck. Trevelyan, enraptured by his tale of ancient sorrow and regret, suddenly distracted by a whiff of garlic and onion breath.

It was not as if it mattered. Trevelyan’s fate was sealed with the rest of humankind. His was an existence that should never have been, if not for a mistake of a prideful man millennia ago. Soon, the Herald of Andraste and his Inquisition would exist only in the memory of the Dread Wolf.

He began to sweat beneath his armor.

Irritably, he tugged the wolf ruff away from his neck and fanned air down his chest. The morning was humid and drenched in brightness. Midges buzzed around his nostrils and ears. 

It would not be long now. In a few minutes, the Viddasala and her men would trample through the southern eluvian, and he would smite them as he had always planned. Trevelyan would run headlong after them, and there Solas would cut him off from the group. He would run up the hill, stop on the rise, and then….

What was Solas to say?

That he had betrayed his only friend left in the world? That he had planned to do so from the beginning?

That he had never meant to take things as far as he did?

 

* * *

 

“Oy, kettle heads!” Sera straddled one of the stone mabari that guarded the gates of Haven. She pointed at Trevelyan and Solas as they walked past the statue’s plinth. “Creepy mage gits, on your right!”

Two of the Templars in the training yard lowered their swords. They stared a few seconds longer than necessary, then returned to their exercises.

Solas folded his hands behind his back. “That amuses you?”

“Yeah?” Sera shoved some greasy treat into her already full mouth. “It’s not like they can do anything, not with Trevelyan as the Herald.”

“What a relief it must be to trust the discretion of the faithful,” said Solas.

“Pffft. I meant they can’t touch _you_ because no one can tell you two apart,” said Sera. “Always heads down, whispering demon shite in the woods like weirdos. The flat-arsed twins: Baldy and Bald-ie-r.” 

“The game is up,” said Trevelyan. “I confess, I stole your haircut.”

“Graver crimes have been made in the name of flattery,” said Solas. “Though I did notice that you have some stubble. The spell you use to depilate yourself—are you sure you are distributing the magic properly?”

“To be honest, I always thought having a hairline was a human thing,” said Trevelyan.

“Ah, but if you were to use smaller concentric vibrations when focusing the spell into your fingertips—”

“Blagh," said Sera. “You’ve gone and made this chicken taste like ass in my mouth. Do you know how hard that is?”

“You’re going to swallow it anyway,” said Trevelyan.

Sera chewed slower. Then she stuck her tongue out at them. She slid off the mabari, and they watched her weave away, still tossing chicken into her mouth.

“I believe we have won the day,” said Solas. “In all seriousness, I can help you if you desire a cleaner shave.”

“So I can look more like you?” Trevelyan gave him a small smile.  

“Perhaps,” said Solas, and gave him a smile back.

The Templars in the yard were taking a break to cool down. They leaned on training dummies and mimed the pleas and gurgled screams of remembered foes, or perhaps unfortunate future ones. It was the same performance they had given within earshot of Solas and Trevelyan every day since the Conclave, as childish as it was churlish.

“If they ever bother you,” said Trevelyan, “let me know.”

“Oh?” said Solas. “What would you do to stop them?”

Trevelyan met his eyes. There was nothing mocking or sardonic in him now. Instead, there was the cold resolution of a man who was not in the habit of making false promises.

“Whatever I had to,” he said. “I won’t let anyone put you in a cage.”

There were a thousand wry observations Solas could make to that, but, against his better judgment, he believed him.

“Thank you,” he said. 

 

* * *

 

In retrospect, it should not have surprised him when Trevelyan kissed him in the dream.

“It seems you hold the key to our salvation.” Haven, now buried under tons of ice and stone, was all the more vivid in the Fade. “You had sealed the rift with a gesture, and right then, I felt the whole world change.”

“Felt the whole world _change_?” Trevelyan raised an eyebrow. 

“A figure of speech,” said Solas.

“I’m aware of that,” said Trevelyan. “Solas, do you ever think that you think too much?”

“I believe that would be a redundancy—” And then Trevelyan’s gloved hand caught his tunic and pulled his mouth to his.

The Fade sharpened the senses rather than diluted them—magnified memory and desire until they became more than life-sized. In that kiss, Solas tasted all the lonely years of Trevelyan’s life. He tasted the fear of being hunted and the terrible joy of turning on his hunters. He tasted the burden of freedom and the resentment of captivity, and the glory of what it was to wake in the morning with no one to tell him to remain silent and pray for his wicked soul.

He tasted his human lips and his human sweat and the rasp of his human beard against his cheek.

It had proven too much, and Solas had shoved him away.

 

* * *

 

They had not spoken of it afterwards. Trevelyan was, for a time, contrite in Solas’s presence. The awkwardness lasted until greater needs took the forefront, and duty returned them to the wilderness. The months of closing rifts and slaying Red Templars blurred into each other, and one day Solas found himself seeking out the Inquisitor for a favor.

Strange, how his grief for Wisdom forced him to rethink the kiss.   

He was lonely. He was in mourning. His body yearned for connection.

Rationalizing the feelings did not make them go away.  

Trevelyan did not lack for magnetism. He was devious, an unapologetic cheat, and he navigated the pathways of an ignorant world with an iconoclasm that Solas found admirable. 

More than that, he had been a true friend. He treated Solas with a tenderness he did not deserve. Was there anyone else in this world who could say the same?

And so, of course, like a fool, he sought out the Inquisitor’s bed.

 

* * *

 

“You should know," said Solas, with one knee on the bed. "It cannot be more than this."

"So you say," said Trevelyan, and drew him down into the sheets. "Sera's right, by the way. We have no arse between the two of us."  

They shared each other’s bodies without shyness or regret. In dreams between lovemaking, they ran the highways and forgotten roads of the Fade as wolves one moment, deer the next, at times as field mice and minnow. In the dim hours before morning, Trevelyan played with fire in his palm, and told Solas about his journeys as an agent of the Mage Collective. He told him, without boastfulness, of how he had freed mages from the Circles, traded rare grimoires to apostates in remote locations, and secured safe-houses for informants against the Chantry. They whispered until light limned the edge of the curtains, and drifted off in each other's arms.

There would be no repeat occurrence. That much was certain. This was already ill-advised, and there were greater concerns to address.

Still, as he lay in the tangled sheets of Trevelyan’s bed, Solas had looked down at the marked hand thrown across his chest, and, on a whim, woven their fingers together. The Anchor pulsed like a brand between their palms.

_I won’t let anyone put you in a cage._

Whether he thought it as a promise, or as a reminder of the oath his friend had once made to him, he wasn’t sure.

Either way, it was sincere.

 

* * *

 

 

Solas stared down at his sweating reflection in the puddle. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. His gauntlets were swimming now, and his toes squishing with it.

Where in creation was the Viddasala?

Returning to the eluvian, he waved a hand over it. One by one, he checked the activated mirrors in the ruins.  Qunari bodies were scattered everywhere. And in a small meadow beside a brook—

Solas’s heart skipped a beat.

Varric Tethras’s dead body lay between two Qunari.

They had flanked and corned him. Both were full of crossbow bolts, but evidently had overcome agony to deliver the deathblow. The dwarf’s head was barely attached to his shoulders.

The palms of Solas’s hands prickled.

He flashed through the eluvians quicker and quicker. There, the body of the huge sarabaas, and there the Viddasala. Where was—

Before the final eluvian, the one leading to his grotto, two figures were huddled over a collapsed man in the dust. Dorian and Cassandra, both blood-stained, both shouting, hovered over Trevelyan’s unmoving form.

Solas stepped back from the eluvian.

Things had not gone according to plan.

The anchor was still spewing in Trevelyan’s upturned palm. Every few seconds it gushed a pulse of raw energy, shocking him until his body twitched and curled in on itself. The mark’s hungry veins had already spread to his elbow, and magic blackened like corruption in the flesh of his hand.

Solas began to pace.

It would be wise to let Trevelyan die at this juncture. The entire point of this roundabout game had been to force Trevelyan to come to him, to force him to ask for help. If he came to Trevelyan, what would it do but weaken his own resolve?

The Inquisition would collapse without its Inquisitor. That much was certain. The ensuing chaos would wash a bloodbath across the South—unavoidable, unforgivable. The future, however, would benefit greatly without the interference of the one man who could possibly distract Solas from his path.

It could only aid his cause to let Trevelyan die.

The Dread Wolf strode across the empty grotto and passed through the southern mirror.

 

* * *

 

Cassandra and Dorian jumped as he emerged into their clearing. Dorian, at least, had the good, if insulting instinct to leap to his feet and stand in front of the Inquisitor with his staff. Cassandra grabbed his arm with a cry of “wait!” and turned to him.

“Solas, you must help him, he….” The Seeker waved helplessly at where the Inquisitor had fallen.

“Yes, as if this entire business isn’t his fault.” Dorian still hadn’t moved, and the focus crystal of his staff flashed a warning purple. “Here for a warm reunion? A sip of tea?”

“If you wish him to die, then by all means, keep bristling.” Solas had not removed his hands from where they were clasped behind his back.

Dorian snarled. For a moment, it seemed the Viddasala’s planned fate might befall him, but sense penetrated his Tevinter skull, and he stepped aside. Solas approached the Inquisitor.

The mark had already eaten its way into the bone of the arm. It would not be saved.

Unfortunate….even more unfortunate for Trevelyan, who climbed trees faster than a squirrel and wielded his staff like a spearman. A boon for Solas, surely, and a weakening of his worst enemy.

“I am sorry about Varric,” he said.

“You’re damned right you are!” Dorian’s voice had never sounded so feral. “Where were you ten minutes ago? Twenty? Where were you when we needed you? Preening in front of a mirror? Checking your reflection?”

Solas decided not to answer that.

Instead, he made a fist, and called upon the spirit of Mythal inside him.

It was as if his blood turned to light. Something that was and was not himself lit up within him, and showed him what to do.

He removed the Anchor from Trevelyan’s arm as simply as if it was the stone of a plum. Then, with a wrench of his wrist, he turned the dead arm to ash, so that it would cause no further pain.

“What in Andraste’s name did you do?” said Dorian. “You were supposed to save his arm not—”

“I suggest you keep your repudiations to yourself.”

Trevelyan groaned and opened his eyes.

“Solas?”

It had been a long time since the Dread Wolf heard his name whispered groggily in the morning.

Nothing had gone according to plan.

Plans, however, failed all the time. Plans could be reconstructed, rearranged.

Priorities could be shifted.

With a wave of his hand, he put Dorian and Cassandra to sleep. Their bodies folded and collapsed like scarecrows, Dorian hitting his head with a satisfying clunk against the focus stone of his staff.

Then, in the easy way he used to, the Dread Wolf bent down and swept Trevelyan into his arms. The Inquisitor groaned and reached out for his fallen comrades.

The world and humankind would burn, that much was assured.

But he would keep this one part for himself.

Even if it meant locking Trevelyan in a cage.

Even if it meant suspending him in magical sleep for centuries—

He would keep the one tender part of his heart alive and close.

Perhaps one day he would need it again, when his mercy ran dry and monstrousness threatened to consume him.

Perhaps he would allow Trevelyan to wake from his slumber, and beg him to change his mind.

Perhaps he would ask only to be held.

Who could know? Certainly not he. He carried the Inquisitor in his arms back to the mirror, and, a new plan for the future already forming in his mind, stepped through it into the light.


End file.
